


Meet you all the way

by azurejay (andchimeras)



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Andy and Joe also, Artist AU, Friends With Benefits, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, and Ashlee, but now you know, hey bandom it's been a minute, idk how to rate this, the Bob in question is Bob McLynn, there is a lot of swearing, there is a reference to handjobs, there is kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-02 11:58:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15796062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchimeras/pseuds/azurejay
Summary: The one where they're installation artists. Just go with it."A portrait of David Bowie in spray-painted car doors bolted to the back side of an abandoned train station in Detroit.'What is that even *about*?‘ Patrick says."





	Meet you all the way

The first one Patrick sees is an ampersand, 20' tall, painted on the side of the library in Hollywood. He recognizes it immediately: the herringbone pattern Pete stencilled in Prague, somehow painted both neon and pastel at the same time. The bricks of the library make it seem crumpled, like a discarded piece of paper.

It’s on Instagram in about half an hour: **STUNTZ??????**

.  
.  
.

“Wump,” Pete said.

“Absolutely fucking not,” Patrick said.

The basement was dim and dusty, shadows of old desks and office chairs and CRT monitors stacked against the walls.

“Peterick.”

“Could you fucking please pay attention--”

The flash cotton caught off the glue gun and burned its way up the wire in an instant.

“Fuck!” Patrick threw the glue gun to the floor and stamped his foot.

“Oh,” Pete said, “hey, dude, Stuntz.”

“What are you talking about?” Patrick said, fishing more flash cotton out of the bag.

Pete picked up the glue gun and brushed the ashes from the wire. “We need a name.”

“I know,” Patrick said. “Not Wump. Or the other thing.”

With the glue gun in his hand, oozing melty burny injury waiting to happen, Pete stepped up behind Patrick and hugged him around the shoulders. “I was just trying to get your attention, Rick.”

Patrick tossed the flash cotton away, because it was less dangerous than getting out of the hug. “I wasn't listening.”

Pete laughed right in his ear and it was not fine, it was annoying and Patrick wanted to elbow him in the stomach and knee him in the nads, but it also was fine, because Pete was hugging him and breathing on his neck and getting glitter all over Patrick's shirt and he smelled like glue and burning and root beer and it was so good.

Patrick laughed too. “So what did you say?”

“Stuntz,” Pete said.

“Stuntz?” Patrick looked at the cobwebbed ceiling, thinking about it. Pete swayed them back and forth and it was pretty--well. “Okay, yeah, that's cool.”

“Right? But allcaps. _STUNTZ_.” He hardcore barked it in Patrick's ear and then the elbowing and kneeing happened.

.  
.  
.

Bob texts him, **So? What's up?** and Patrick doesn't know what to say, so he ignores it.

Andy texts him, **&?**

Patrick sends back, **nope**.

Then, a dozen copper-sheeted sculptures rising from the banks of the Rhine: lungs, kidneys, liver, heart. Patrick turns his phone's data, wifi, and messaging off.

Bob calls him.

“What?” he barks, as if Patrick had interrupted him.

“I don't know; I don't want to talk about it,” Patrick says.

“I don't care,” Bob replies. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”

Patrick rubs his hand over his face. He’s so tired. He'd been up late, grading composition assignments. He'd been up late looking at photos of himself and Pete and the crew splattered in paint, Patrick with a bunch of audio cables hanging around his neck, Pete just grinning. In one, they were both pointing up at the red and orange sheets draped under light rigging. The glowing colours stretched back into the distance; a hangar at midnight. The problem with photos of their projects was that they were silent, like Patrick hadn't done anything.

“Hello? Fucking christ,” sighs Bob.

“I'll...call him? I guess,” Patrick says.

“Yeah, you will,” Bob says. “And sign that thing for the Children's Museum, please.”

“All _right_ , fuck.”

When he puts his phone back in his pocket, he hears bears roaring, church organs, violins, Pete’s voice, a poem.

.  
.  
.

He was scraping a long series of hard notes out of his guitar when Pete came up beside him and ducked/lunged? in to his neck with a kiss. Between Patrick sucking in one wet breath and another, a second kiss to his cheek. And he doesn't know if he turned his head or Pete's hand on his neck urged him to touch his mouth to Pete's. It's. Exactly right. The angle was weird and there was an electric guitar between them and their teeth clacked together and they both clapped their hands over their mouths and laughed, leaning against each other, and their fingers interlaced. Pete almost tripped on the cords between the amps and the guitar and the pedals, trying to help Patrick get the guitar over his head.

It's precisely what Patrick thought would happen, awkward and noisy and stupid, and that's the best part.

.  
.  
.

He texts Joe: **idek**

**it's not you?**

**no just him**

**did he tell you?**

Patrick grits his teeth. **did he tell YOU??**

**no**

**then why would i know**

**when did you talk to him?**

An exchange of New year's texts, with firework and champagne emojis. **a few months ago**

**he didn't say anything?**

**he's doing Chi biennale next year**

**yeah anything else**

**I'm calling him tomorrow so**

**100%**

**fu**

.  
.  
.

The only thing Pete ever wanted to keep secret was Patrick. It didn't bother him at first; all the important things they did together were secret, so it made sense that whatever they were doing to each other's bodies would be the same.

But then they were at a thing at Patrick’s college and Pete kissed Patrick’s knuckles and Patrick choked on his beer. Pete gave Joe a dangerous grin, like he was about to set flame to a stream of spray paint.

“What--actually--is happening?” Joe said, half smiling, like he was prepared to be in on the joke as soon as someone told him what it was. Patrick swallowed; he felt like there were rocks in his throat. He couldn't stop coughing.

“It’s fine,” Pete said. He put Patrick’s arm around his neck and smacked Patrick’s back. It helped.

Joe squinted at them. Then his whole face scrunched, like he still didn't quite get it, but he was _trying_. “I dunno--”

Pete’s hand fisted in Patrick’s jacket collar. “It’s _fine_!”

“Dude.” Joe raised his eyebrows.

Patrick’s eyes were watering, but he lifted his beer to his mouth again and gulped, swallowing the rocks down. He gasped, “It’s totally fine, man.”

“Okay,” Joe said, shaking his head. “We’ll discuss it later.” He pointed at the case they were standing beside. “Can I play that burnt-out clarinet now?”

.  
.  
.

“So what the fuck are you guys doing!” Joe shouted as soon as they got out of the school parking lot.

Patrick cringed. “Jesus! I'm driving, here!”

Joe slumped back in his seat and groaned, “What the fuck are you guys _doing_.”

“Just. I mean. It's fun.”

Joe rolled his eyes over at Patrick, who attempted a smile and knew as he was doing it that he was failing spectacularly.

He tried again. “We get a lot of work done.”

“That is so--it’s not work. It's pranks that are not funny, and I guess a lot of s-e-x.”

Patrick squeezed the steering wheel. “Don't, man.” He was getting a bit mad, but also Joe wasn't wrong

“I'm not! I'm just saying. What is happening? What are his intentions? What are yours? Are you using protection?”

Patrick swung the car abruptly into a Target parking lot, clicked it into park, yanked the emergency brake, and slapped at Joe with both hands. Joe countered and they were laughing with stinging faces when Patrick said,

“I don't know, man. It's fun. I've liked him for a while and it just. Happened.” He shrugged. “Casual. We’re friends.”

Joe sighed. He pressed his hands to his blotchy cheeks and said, “Okay, dude. Okay.” He laughed. “Have as much fun as you can stand, since you won't be able to sit! Ha!” Patrick slapped him again.

.  
.  
.

A hundred count of vintage punk posters with the silhouette of two embracing skeletons cut out of the middle.

"That's melodramatic as fuck," Patrick snapped.

Pete deleted the stencil.

Patrick hadn't thought about it since New York, but suddenly it's 10 years later and he’s looking at it fifty feet long across the plaza.

How fucking dare he.

.  
.  
.

"Just record nothing and it'll be--"

"If you want to do this by yourself, fucking do it." Patrick snapped his laptop closed.

"I don't want to! Jesus Christ." Pete was laying on the floor, shirtless on the cold tile of Patrick's basement. The high, thin windows, open, let in the dirty salt smell and rasping smash of the ocean.

Patrick clicked off the work lamp on the drafting table and laid down too.

They stared at the tongue-in-groove pine ceiling until the tide went out.

.  
.  
.

While Patrick was in the shower, Pete took a photo of the sheets on his bed. At the studio, he blew it up to 10'x10', printed on heavy rag paper. He crawled over the paper on his garage floor, painting two watercolour shapes intersecting, cutting out the space where they overlapped.

Patrick edited together a loop of indistinct voices: laughter, sighing, snoring, breathing, singing, whispering; heartbeats. He rigged the speakers behind the painting so the sound would play through the hole, out of the darkness of the unused subway tunnel.

When he put his paint into their signature on the wall, after Pete went above ground to get a cab, his stomach sank. He thought it would be beautiful, but looking at the white paper suspended in the infinite darkness, he didn't see a haven of comfort. He didn't hear life happening even in the void.

They’d installed a death. Grief. Ghosts.

In the taxi, Pete held his hand. Patrick felt the silent space between their palms, between their bodies, between their heads turned, looking away out opposite windows. He couldn't turn back.

.  
.  
.

The story goes:

Getty Center. Exhibit of midwestern modern artists. She touched his arm while he was sitting, almost asleep, across from _Big Green Man_.

Pete woke up and didn't even smile. Ashlee was smiling. And they stayed together for a week straight. And they moved in together.

.  
.  
.

They launched the ten thousand papiér mâche cameras in April, and then Pete was going to Wisconsin to see Andy, and Patrick was going to London to work with a new experimental chamber ensemble. The last day in Strasbourg was spent in Patrick's hotel room, exchanging hand jobs and eating terrible pizza.

“Pizza is always good,” Pete said, chewing doggedly on a tough bite of salty crust.

Patrick made a _bleh_ face and corrected him. “Any pizza is better than no pizza. Not the same thing.”

“Eh,” Pete shrugged. “Respectfully disagree.”

The box crunched under Patrick's knees when he got down to kiss Pete's thighs and stomach.

.  
.  
.

After that, they didn't see each other for seven weeks. Patrick met him at the restaurant in the Seattle pop culture museum and Pete hugged him loosely.

“How was the thing at the Getty? You didn’t post about it.” Patrick’s fingers were damp and chilly from his bottle of orange soda.

Pete folded and then shredded a napkin. “Okay--Trav wants to take a couple of months off his band and do something together.”

Patrick nodded, feeling a bit goosebumpy. “That sounds awesome, dude, you should come stay with me in Long Beach--”

“Nah, we found a place in LA,” Pete said. He smiled a little at Patrick. “It will probably get loud. And messy.”

“Fair,” Patrick said. The goosebumps turned into a hot prickle on the back of his neck. Pete was staring at his mouth; neither of them had said anything for a couple of minutes. Pete glanced at Patrick's throat, Patrick's hands, his own hands on top of a scattering of shredded napkin.

Patrick swallowed. “Is everything okay?”

“I,” Pete croaked. He cleared his throat. “At the Getty. I met a girl. I--.” He stopped, brushed the napkin pieces into a pile and off the edge of the table. His hands dropped to his lap.

“Oh,” Patrick said.

“She's so pretty, Rick.” He sounded lost, dreamy, unsure--he clearly wanted Patrick to let him off the hook.

Say nothing meant anything. “That's--okay.” He meant it to be a question, but it came out flat and certain.

Pete lit up, halfway. Patrick could tell his hands were clasping together under the table.

“Man,” Pete said, “Hemmy likes her so much--”

An hour later, Patrick threw up foamy orange anger in the disabled bathroom stall and could not stop crying hot--scalding--tears.

.  
.  
.

Pete and Travie opened Without You, I'm Just Me and sold out that first night. Patrick went through at noon on a Saturday, peering between the shoulders and elbows of taller people to spy on the work, tiny red circle stickers on every placard. It was pretty good.

He wasn't jealous of Travie and Pete working together. There was a small--for Pete, it was small--canvas that said _bi-polar bear_ , and Pete would never have made that working with Patrick. He might not even have made it working on his own. This is--they were never exclusive, so. Patrick rolled his eyes at a spray-painted triptych of Jack Daniels bottles, and also at himself.

It was weird to see Pete's work without any sound but the other people in the gallery. Patrick stepped between the pieces of a giant, broken, neon pink canvas hanging from the ceiling and thought, _I would've put a motion sensor in here_. Shattering glass. Blowing wind instruments in a cement mixer. Hall  & Oates.

.  
.  
.

He thinks about touching Pete’s hand the last night in California. He thinks about nudging Pete’s bare foot with his socked toes. The warm platinum light of the August moon reflected in waves on his ceiling. The sound of them breathing.

No one can ever sell that. No one but them will ever know they made that.

.  
.  
.

Anna pogoing. A circle pit at a Racetraitor show. Dirty taking a sack of potatoes to the chest. Joe’s first flip-cup win. Andy doing his awful body weight exercises in a skate park. Travie throwing paint balls at canvases.

Clips projected on the walls of the church--Pete sitting in a pew with a glass of champagne, wearing a morning coat over a knee-length fuchsia smock and ripped up jeans. His arm around Ashlee’s waist; she was perched on the back of the pew, legs crossed in her long lace dress, listening intently to someone wearing a hat, dress, tights, and shoes striped with canary yellow over black.

She _is_ pretty. She’s a musician, her sister was in a reality show or something--

“Also a singer,” Joe said.

“Nah, man,” Travie said. “I think she was in the Dukes of Hazzard movie.”

Patrick made a note on his wedding program. “People can do more than one thing.”

“No, tell it to my business card, please,” Travie said, throwing several of said cards at Patrick. One landed in the glass of champagne he was juggling in his elbow while he wrote:

 _Recorded crowd noise?_  
_Play over live music._  
_Invert spotlights?_

.  
.  
.

A portrait of David Bowie in spray-painted car doors bolted to the back side of an abandoned train station in Detroit.

“What is that even _about_?” Patrick says. He leans against his kitchen counter, watching shaky video of the piece on his iPad. Yesterday, he told Joe he would call. So he's calling.

Pete laughs for a really long time and then says, “You even paying attention, Rick?”

“Fuck you, dude, of course I am; everyone is, Bob has been calling me--”

“Me too.”

They breathe at each other for a minute.

“It’s the takeover,” Pete says. “The break’s over.”

Patrick hangs up on him.

.  
.  
.

Because it was called Solo Show, and because Patrick knew it took Bob weeks to talk Pete out of calling it The Divorce Album, he went to the opening gala.

The space had high, high ceilings, and panels of stiff fabric run on tracks criss-crossing it. Video and still images were projected onto the fabric; looking up, looking for them, Patrick saw the metal boxes where the projectors were mounted, clinging to the ceiling like moths.

Pete's face, ten feet tall, smiling and then screaming. Time lapse video of him sleeping, the light from the windows getting bright and dim and cycling again, while he turns back and forth. A bonfire. And another. Photo after photo of him making that stupid snarling face. On the floor, by the bar, under people’s feet an enormous print of his face, again, eyes closed, mascara trailing and smeared down his cheeks.

In the back, Pete was sitting on a crate, leaning back on his hands, staring down somewhere between his knees and the floor, kicking his hightops against the plastic. Thud, thud, thud.

“Hey, man,” Patrick said.

Pete blinked and looked up. “Hey,” he said, a croak, like he had been talking too much or not talking at all.

Patrick smiled a little bit and boosted himself up on the crate, close. Hands clasped between his knees, he bumped his shoulder into Pete's arm.

“Hm.”

“You're not alone,” Patrick said.

“I like being alone,” Pete said.

“Okay.”

Pete looked at him and repeated, seriously, “I _like_ being alone.”

That sparked a sharp pain in Patrick's stomach and he flinched. He tried not to, but he could tell Pete noticed.

Pete's eyes widened and he said, quickly, “It's not you--”

“It's okay,” Patrick said. It clearly was not okay, but he’d earned a fucking lie. “I just meant, you have friends, and we know what you're going through.”

Then Travie came around the corner with a bottle of champagne and they got started on the afterparty a bit early.

On the way out, hours later, a cocktail napkin stuck to his shoe and lipstick all over his cheek, Patrick saw the photo projected on the wall between the front doors for the first time. Pete's back, a fuzzy grey cocoon instead of his head, _Mr. Moth_ captioned across his shoulders in hard black letters.

.  
.  
.

The book was heavy, the pages were thick and smooth. The cover was black and blue. _STUNTZ_ , in blunt letters across the front and down the spine.

 _Nothing means anything_ , on the dedication page.

Essentially everyone who had an opinion on anonymous installation art called them sellouts, but Bob said fuck 'em, and he was right. Look, okay, between the book cheque and auctioning off the materials from the Take This To Your Grave series, Patrick had enough money to take a year off teaching and tour with Atto Triumfa, wearing sharp suits and making fantastic noises in small clubs. Like a real musician.

.  
.  
.

A lot of people thought STUNTZ was one person. Some people thought it was two.

.  
.  
.

It was--Patrick was pretty sure they probably both wanted it to be serious, but they both thought the other one was just messing around. Or some other bullshit. He was 21 when they started the sex stuff, and 25 when they stopped, which means Pete was basically 30, and should have been a goddamn adult about it. For fuck’s sake.

It didn’t make it better. It never made anything better. Not when Pete married Ashlee, not when they broke up, not when Patrick was dating and Pete was dating and all of their friends were dating or married or divorced or when anyone’s dogs died--it didn’t matter. It was shitty. It was a shitty situation and they both behaved shittily, but mostly Pete.

“Pete’s a fucking asshole,” Patrick said to his mirror, the morning of Pete’s 39th birthday show.

“No one is surprised,” Patrick replied to his reflection. “Everybody knows that.”

It was true, and Patrick didn't even care anymore.

.  
.  
.

A few 20’x20’ boards on the floor, wooden figures jerked up and down on them by wires--Patrick followed the leads to the pulleys on the ceiling, and down to an electrical box on the wall, and across the floor. People were dutifully trailing past a path of strewn guitar picks, popcorn kernels, thumb tacks around the edges of the room--weight-sensitive plates under the carpet laid for them to follow.

The figures were made of rough wood sprayed with gold paint, dotted with purple and black and every neon colour.

“Fuck,” Joe said beside him.

“Yeah,” Patrick said.

The rest of the show was pretty much more of the same-- _everything is art_ , stencilled under a stained glass happy face.

 _Nothing means anything_ , on the back of the commemorative program.

.  
.  
.

217 Gideon Bibles arranged to spell out XO on the central quad where Patrick teaches.

Patrick kicks one of them, and several of the people gathered around to look at this--this fucking _nonsense_ \--stare at him instead.

He slams his office door closed, breathing hard. His hands are shaking on his phone.

**you fucking asshole**

**who dis**

**FUCK YOU**

About twenty minutes go by while he's pacing across the ten feet between a bookcase of records and a wall of instruments. He feels like he’s going to break his phone where he’s squeezing it in his pocket.

Mouth compressed into a flat line, he stabs the screen with his thumbs: **fine**

**what**

**come to the studio**

**when**

**saturday**

.  
.  
.

Patrick is up a ladder with a crate of dishes, throwing them into an open grand piano. The sound is fucking amazing, until Pete comes in to the warehouse and yells,

“Hey!”

Startled, Patrick drops the crate fifteen feet and can hear the guts of the piano implode. The clamp mikes jerk, three of them fall off, and the stand mikes wobble dangerously. The boom mike bungee corded to the ladder slips free and tumbles down, closing the piano’s lid with a discordant bang.

“For fuck’s sake!”

His voice is the last thing to stop echoing. He's panting, clutching the top of the ladder, looking down at Pete clutching the legs of the ladder.

“Sorry,” Pete says, voice raspy, eyes huge.

Patrick forces himself to breathe slowly through his nose. “Just hold on to the thing, okay.”

Pete nods and sets his feet firmly on the concrete. Patrick climbs down.

.  
.  
.

The tape player is labelled “International Paper” with sharpie on masking tape. The sound is Patrick saying _makin’ ‘em millions_ in a sort of sing-song, alone, and then two of him, and then four, sixteen, two hundred and fifty-six, until there are apparently millions of him.

And then silence.

Pete takes his hands and turns him so his back is against the wall, presses their hands between their chests and his knee between Patrick's thighs. Licks across Patrick's cheek; Patrick makes a grossed out noise and catches Pete's mouth.

The tape deck clicks the play button up as the tape ends. He'll try to remember to rewind it before they leave.

.  
.  
.

“You probably owe Eve millions,” Pete says, while they're straightening their clothes, hurried.

“Jesus Christ. I paid her,” Patrick says. He wipes his wrist across his forehead and pulls down the sleeve of his sweater just as the lights outside the tape room snap on.

The doors will open soon. The show is about to start.

.  
.  
.

A fluorescent purple **+** against, inside, the curtain of rushing water. For five minutes, the sound of stones cracking and bass like having your sternum split apart and a shear vertical arpeggio of electric guitar, and then it’s gone. Everything has already happened.

.  
.  
.

Patrick looks at the wreckage of his sound project, and then at Pete.

Pete clears his throat. “Okay, so, I missed you, and I know it was my fault, but then I got over it--”

“Just fucking _stop_ \--”

Pete stops talking, suddenly enough to startle Patrick into silence too, but he is staring at Patrick, like. They never bothered with small, and this is huge. This is the biggest yet.

“I missed you too,” Patrick says. “Okay? I love you. I don't want to keep shredding myself up over this, just--"

Pete nods and comes closer, hands in his pockets, face solemn, eyes dark and shining. “Yeah, okay.”

“--stay.” Patrick exhales and laughs a little bit, “Jesus Christ. You never listen to the whole pitch.” He feels lightheaded; he feels like the bells inside their glass cases, making perfect, silent music to each other, razor sharp chrome curves blinding in the spotlights.

Pete grins. “You haven't had a bad idea in your life, Slump.” He touches Patrick's scarred eyebrow, arriving.

.  
.  
.

**Author's Note:**

> Knowing belladonnalin, heyginger, kitty, and lalejandra kept bandom in my brain since the last thing; heyginger and lalejandra helped with this thing, and they are absolute treasures.
> 
> Music! Not so much a soundtrack as a reference key: [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/12174877135/playlist/3g4NfIK6C57lQrxmc0FMUm?si=RHRpoM8LSS6jPNpgEh8aKQ) on the spotify thing, and [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE3YXTJsX5bi7uQCVDksYGltqqSVkLUdK) on the youtube thing.


End file.
